Scroogle Scraper Alternatives

If you have tried to go to Scroogle.org recently you have probably come to the conclusion that it is no longer available. This is not a temporary thing. Google had been making Scroogle's life difficult for some time limiting the amount of results they were able to show per day. On top of that, the server's that Scroogle resided on were constantly under attack by DDos attacks creating much strain on their servers and bandwidth.

What was Scroogle Scraper?

Scroogle was a fantastic piece of web software that allowed you to search Google completely privately. Scroogle essentially scraped Google results giving users the ability to search completely anonymously. Not only was it great for private searching, it was also a great tool for webmasters who wanted to check where they ranked in Google for certain keywords without all the filters applied by their Google account as well as their geographical location.

One of the nice features was the ability to search for 100 results at a time, which made it very quick to scroll through the top 1000 results looking for your web site.

While a lot of webmasters loved Scroogle, a lot of users were just regular users like you and me who were worried about their internet privacy. There was a plugin available for all the major browsers that allowed you to seach anonymously. All information from Scroogle's servers were purged hourly making it a great tool for people worried about Big Brother looking over their shoulder.

History of Scroogle Scraper

Scroogle was launched in 2003 by Daniel Brandt, and steadily grew in size until 2005 when it hit a tipping point and had traffic explode. In 2010 Google began throttling Scroogle, making it very difficult to provide the free service many people had grown to love. As mentioned above, Google has recently started to further throttle Scroogle, making it increasingly difficult to use the service. The service was shut down February 2012, due to throttling as well as attacks from hackers.

Scroogle Scraper Alternatives

While I have been searching, I have yet to find another alternative suitable for webmasters as no other service scrapes Google. However there are some options for users who have concerns about privacy.

DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo is a Hybrid search engine originally created by serial entrepreneur Gabriel Weinberg. The search engine uses a number of API's to build a dynamic index which has suprisingly good results. The main reason I've mentioned this search engine is that the company philosophy revolves around privacy and not recording user information.

Ixquick

Another search engine that is dedicated to privacy is Ixquick. While the results are completely private, the only drawback is the search engine relies on meta data, which tends to return less relevant results other technologies on the market. Nonetheless, if privacy is a concern, and you can't find what you are looking for on DuckDuckGo, give Ixquick a look.